Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) began airing a live video feed of its preliminary fights from all the major televised events through its Facebook page, starting with UFC 129: "St. Pierre vs. Shields" back in April of this year.

In January 2012, that arrangement will come to an end.

That's because the UFC is moving its "Prelims" to the FOX network as part of the blockbuster programming deal it signed with the broadcast conglomerate just last month.

UFC President Dana White (via El Octagono) explains:

"[The Facebook fights] will go away when the FOX deal starts which is in January because all that programming now, I mean the reason we did the Facebook fights was because nobody could see those fights. So we put them up on Facebook as an option for fans, because we always love to give more fights. But with the fact that FOX wants to pick up all these fights, they'll be on television now."

When I was at the Bisping UFC thing in Manchester on Monday, I was speaking to the guy who runs UFC_UK on Twitter, and he said that the FX deal for TUF has no link to the Fox deal, which I thought was strange. He also said that it's unlikely that ESPN will be showing the Versus card next week, so they'll have to air that somewhere else again.